[G1911]

I'd much prefer it be a reflection of a growing interest in the sport and its extensive history and great card sets, but I don't think the evidence supports this, sadly. I guess all the "real collectors" who didn't jump aboard with the 2020 hype train stand to make considerable profits by joining the pump, but a pump it is. Maybe it will crash, maybe the hype will be self-sustaining as it sometimes has been for sports cards (the entire Rookie card concept started as a pump by dealers to artificially inflate values on some cards, but has continued and continued to grow constantly for almost 40 years now). 'If you bull**** long enough, it becomes true'.

As a collector, I hope it crashes. I treat card collecting as beer money, I'm buying valueless pictures of men because I like the hobby, the research and pieces the little details of T card sets together, and collecting. I might sell a couple Johnsons in my dupe trade bait box, but none of my collection.

I would predict (and will probably be proven wrong) that some of the more common material returns to earth at some point (like the aforementioned superprinted T218 Johnson's, the insane prices on 1938 Churchman Johnson's of which there seems to be an EX+ condition copy for every person on the planet), but more difficult items may not. some % of pumpers will jump on board for a longer time, and there are many items with a very low surviving population. I would expect the pop report to explode, most boxing items just don't get graded because there hasn't historically been the "print money" attitude (key reason I focus on boxing) that has taken over the major sports card collecting. The modern guys may return to earth a bit less, as they have a surviving affluent fan base. Johnson is attractive to modern eyes as he was 1) truly great, 2) outspoken and has a fascinating story and 3) that story fits contemporary popular social narratives, but he lacks the living fan base of Ali, Tyson, etc. Baseball worships its history (and thus sustains Cobb, Ruth), boxing generally does not. I would think Ali has the highest chance of sustaining the growth.


I've thought for years that eventually people have to wake up and realize that a plastic slab and slip from a company that grades absurd numbers of altered cards and has been caught in bad business practices and inconsistencies too numerous to enumerate means absolutely nothing, and that the plastic multiplying a cards value 2x, 3x, 1,000x now for some cards is insanity. Thus far I have been wrong for decades. The pump seems to never end. None of this is in any conceivable way rational, which makes it hard to predict how this ends up.


I would say Joe Louis was priced about fairly pre-pump. He was a more valuable card, the guys driving bigger prices all doing so because of personality or modernity. Only Johnson and maybe Dempsey and Sullivan, I think, really outsold Louis, relative to period/population for guys before living collectors memory (his peak was before the memory of almost all surviving collectors). I value boxers more on ability than narratives, so I think of it as more that Ali/Johnson/Tyson are overhyped narratives than that Louis is unfairly forgotten.